ABSTRACT
Located within the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Wales, Lampeter, the Religious Experience Research Centre (RERC) currently contains over 6,000 accounts of religious experience: conversion testimonies, descriptions of encounters with numinous presences, feelings of supernatural fear and horror, descriptions of answered prayer, encounters with unusual lights, and many others. Such an unusual collection has itself an unusual history. Its originator was a zoologist, Sir Alister Hardy, who was born in Nottingham in 1896. Hardy, an outstanding academic who was to receive a knighthood in recognition of his research into marine biology, developed early in his life a particular concern to explore the newly emerging theory of evolution and the implications arising from it for a range of areas of human experience, not least those of religion and spirituality. When his early academic studies were interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War and Hardy was called up for active service he appears to have made some sort of vow to ‘what I called God’: if he was to survive the war, he would devote himself to an attempt to bring about a reconciliation between humankind’s spiritual and religious awareness on the one hand and Darwinian theory on the other. Hardy happily did survive the war, and by the mid1920s had been appointed chief zoologist on the exploratory vessel Discovery. It was at this point that the case collection of religious experiences housed at the RERC archives was to have its genesis.
